Budget 2012

It’s been a dodgy few weeks for the Government. Rightly so. It was a bad budget by any measure; a budget where millions are being made to pay more, so millionaires will pay less.

It was a budget that was bad for fairness, bad for families, bad for pensioners, bad for growth and the economy and even bad for the Conservative-led coalition.

Over a week after Osborne stood at the dispatch box and demonstrated to the world just how out of touch this Government is, the national press is still lambasting the budget.

Did they honestly think the British people wouldn’t notice the tax cut for the wealthiest in the country? That 14,000 people earning £1 million, or more, will get an increase of over £40,000 each year?

Did they think we wouldn’t notice that a family with children, earning £20,000, will lose £252 a year, on top of the VAT rise already costing average families £450 a year? Those young families on £20,000 receiving tax credits, and caught by the 24-hour rule, will lose up to a staggering £3,600 every year.

Outrageously, pensioners’ taxes will rise by £3 billion by 2016, to pay for millionaires’ tax cuts. Four-and-a-half million pensioners paying income tax lose an average of £83 a year. People turning 65 next year lose up to £322. It is scandalous. No wonder the papers are full of it!

And don’t start me on the pasty tax!

It is, of course, feasible the Government did realise cutting the top rate of tax to benefit their friends and donors, and imposing a Granny tax, might be unpopular. After all, David Cameron engineered a situation where he won’t be answering a single question in Parliament, on the budget, for four weeks.